HACKER Q&A
📣 s-t-876

Do you tend to say “our work” or “my work” more often?


I’ve yet to find people with similar enough motivations, outlooks, and experience that we can work well together as a strong team.

It’s been easier for me to work solo and look for options to maximize the amount of work that I could get done alone.

Given the mythical man month principle, I feel that I’m right in choosing to delay as much as possible collaborating with other people.

It seems that working as a group is only beneficial when most of the critical decisions have already been made, and there is already a great process in place so that everyone knows exactly what they need to do and there are fewer arguments.

But I also come across people who don’t seem to have any strong sense of individuality at all and no strong desire for independent thinking.

It seems coming from solo runner/climber vs ball player instinct.

People whose natural instinct is wired to play and enjoy soccer/football etc are hard for me to understand.

And they seem to have taken something from growing up and playing as a team into their work, they would say things like:” you can only win as a team and you can’t win alone.”

So I am not sure if my introverted instinct is an advantage or a blindspot.

And since I am currently building a product for other people, I am concerned that I might create too many introverted assumptions and biases in the app, especially considering how people think of their time.

I think the app I’m creating would be great for solo devs, but how many 100% solo devs are out there anyway?

So do you tend to say “ our work” or “my work” more often in thinking about your work time?

Like how do you draw the line between your work, your effort and others effort?

I would appreciate any insight on this topic.


  👤 uberman Accepted Answer ✓
As an interesting aside, when interviewing candidates I pay attention to "I did.." vs "We did". If a candidate only talks about "what we did" it is a yellow flag that will lead me to press for more details on how they specifically contributed.

👤 sunny1304
I always address in "we" at workplace and always say things like "we did this", "we figured out the issue" etc. Never try to point only on my work unless I am having a one-to-one meeting.